The French Revolution

The French Revolution had almost everything we associate with revolutions – ravenous royals, ambitious aristocrats, rising taxes, failing harvests, food shortages, hungry peasants, angry townspeople, sex, lies, corruption, violence, radicals and weirdos, rumours and conspiracies, state sanctioned terror and head chopping machines. The French Revolution was not the first revolution of the modern era but it has become the measure against which other revolutions are weighed. The political and social upheaval in 18th century France has been studied by millions of people, from scholars on high to students in high school. The storming of the Bastille on July 14th 1789 is one of the defining moments of Western history, a perfect motif of a people in revolution. The men and women of revolutionary France – Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette, the Marquis de Lafayette, Honore Mirabeau, Georges Danton, Jean-Paul Marat, Maximilien Robespierre and others – have been researched, studied, analysed and interpreted. Historians have spent more than two centuries evaluating the French Revolution, trying to decide if it was a leap of progress or a descent into barbarism.

On the surface, the French Revolution had quite straightforward causes. By the late 1700s the people of France had endured centuries of gross inequality and exploitation. The prevailing social hierarchy required French commoners, the Third Estate, to perform the nation’s work while carrying its taxation burden. The national treasury was almost empty, drained by grossly mismanagement, inefficiency, corruption, profligate spending and involvement in foreign wars. By the 1780s the king’s ministers were attempting to implement fiscal reforms. What started as a dispute over proposed tax reforms in 1787-88 soon morphed into a movement for political and constitutional change. A confrontation at the Estates General in mid 1789 led to the formation of a National Assembly, the first of several revolutionary assemblies. These events, which were without threats or bloodshed, suggested a peaceful transition in government was possible. But over the coming weeks a wave of popular violence – in Paris, in the countryside and at Versailles itself – hinted at a bloodier revolution to come.